In my personal opinion, a single pass of zeros is good enough, just shy of tens of thousands of dollars of software and hardware, such as magnetic electron microscopes. Two passes, and the overwritten data isn't coming off. Period. Plain and simple. No need for thermite, the mess from belt sanders, drills, etc. Might not be as fun, but it's super tight.

]]>By: Blahhttps://pthree.org/2009/08/31/scrubbing-hard-disk-data/#comment-110120
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:32:16 +0000http://pthree.org/?p=1120#comment-110120Thermite.
]]>By: rustyhttps://pthree.org/2009/08/31/scrubbing-hard-disk-data/#comment-110118
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:17:08 +0000http://pthree.org/?p=1120#comment-110118My own sollution would be to build a belt sander with a vacume to collect the dust, and an entry port large enough to receive 5 1/$" drives. If the belts you can find are not 6" or wider you may need to build the feed mechanism diagonal to the belt path. The 'flat' surface of the belt sander can be either horizontal, or diagonal. (about 45Degrees seems right) and your 'belt feed' should be 'downward turning' to the insertion point. Add a 'tray' at 90 degrees to the belt surface and feed drives to be destroyed. Use a legally certified video tape system to capture the drive going into and being processed.

You end up with a canister of metal filings (some plastic)

Truely paranoid people can then melt the filings down to slag. Of course if you already have a forge, you could avoid the belt sander step...

My favorite, since they will be destroyed anyway: take them to a junkyard with a crane-mounted magnet. Watch them jump 3 meters straight up when the operator turns it on. Destroys disks, heads, seek mechanism. Totally.